Scholars@Hallwalls: Carlos Amador

A monthly lecture series featuring the UB Humanities Institute’s Faculty Fellows for the current academic year, hosted at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center.

4:00pm | Mingling
4:15pm | Introductions and featured talk followed by Q + A

We hope you'll join us in-person for the good camraderie and conversation, but you can also join the livestream via the Hallwalls website.

“Unobligated Bodies” Latin America’s Marginal Aesthetic Categories—El roto, Lo huachafo, and Lo jodido (The broken, ratchet, and “fxxxed”)

Latin American regional intellectuals have long struggled to evolve an aesthetics representing uneven development and racialized, settler colonialist oppression. Carlos M. Amador’s book project tracks contemporary works from the margins of “official,” national cultures that make visible their cultures’ most marginalized, excluded and vulnerable classes. He addresses “uncategorizable works” from Chile, Colombia, and Perú by unhoused and neurodivergent artists, and members of the informal, urban labor classes to document a vernacular aesthetic tradition built on the “unobligated” identities of marginalized classes, using representations of their status as “the broken,” “the ratchet,” and the “fxxxed”

About Carlos M. Amador

Carlos M. Amador works on Twentieth and Twenty-First Latin American Literature, Visual Arts, Film, and cultural production. He has published articles, a book, and other works on contemporary aesthetic practices in Latin America’s Pacific Coast Region and Southern Cone. His current book project, under contract with Queens/McGill Press, writes an alternative history and critical theory of marginal Latin American cultural production.

Live Stream